Canon 6D/HDR ... less than ideal

Hi everyone ,

I tried to take HDR shots with my Canon 6D, but the quality of the image is not good.
What am I doing wrong, contrast is lacking...

The last img is the HDR shot.

Thanks.
Mick

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In camera HDR isn't great, not like what you see from custom software that does this thing as a specialty. There are some settings you can tweak like how far apart the exposures should be, etc, but in the end, about the only thing that comes out of that is a less noisy image with a bit better DR, IMO.

For those shots though, you still need to set a base exposure that is proper, the HDR option will just then take a bracketed set of shots at different exposures around that point. So take a test shot first that has your primary object exposed properly, go down 1/3 to 2/3 stop, then set up your HDR parameters to work around that exposure. Your base exposure was too low, even the sky looks underexposed, and usually that would be close to blown out, I would think, if set up properly.

Agreed, your base exposure is underexposed by close to 2 stops, which is going to affect your overexposed images. Your sky should have at least some blown out areas if the base is exposed correctly, in order to pick up the shadow areas in the structure and foliage.

Heya,

When I do HDR, I generally do anywhere from 3 to 7 shots. Basically, whatever it takes to get a properly exposed foreground, and a properly exposed sky, and I usually take the sky down by another stop for good measure. Then I blend them together. I don't use in-camera HDR abilities. They're not good. They function, and I've seen some ok outputs, and I'm sure someone can post something incredible that they've done with an in-camera HDR option, but for consistent controlled output, you want to do it manually, do your exposures yourself, and blend them yourself with dedicated HDR software.

Photomatrix is $40 for the Essentials and works magic.

I did this with a junk rebel with 7 1-stop difference images.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/odDW​n8

Thanks guys, great help
Will do experimenting next couple of days.... try Canon's HDR software, see what happens.

Cheers,
Mick

You are aware that it is almost a necessity to have a tripod or some othe form of stable support. Thannshoot aperture priority. You want the shutter speed to vary on your bracket shots, not aperture. If aperture is varied, depth of field isn't constant.

Yes John, have tripod and used aperture priority....
... had a quick look of Canon's 'Digital Photo Professional'... has HDR function... and it works OK when I load pics with frames I took.... still lot to learn

Mick

mickdehun wrote in post #17024706
Yes John, have tripod and used aperture priority....
... had a quick look of Canon's 'Digital Photo Professional'... has HDR function... and it works OK when I load pics with frames I took.... still lot to learn

Mick

Mick,

Just as a suggestion to get you started:

1. Don't use automodes for landscape and HDR. Control it all. Go manual. You have LiveView, and it's a powerful tool for generating great HDRs.

2. In manual, set your depth of field via aperture. So in your case, F8, F11, F16 are appropriate for example, whatever works for your scene, but gives you enough depth of field. From there, leave ISO at 100, or take it up a bit if you need faster shutters for some reason (like a windy day and you don't want motion blur, then you would want ISO to force shutter faster, but this is an exception).

3. With LiveView on, go ahead and dial down the shutter to whatever it takes to expose your foreground correctly to you, ignore the sky for this, just the foreground.

4. Now simply start taking exposures at 1 or 2 stop intervals from that point, until your sky is exposed properly (ignore that the foreground will become underexposed during this process, that's why you already exposed for the foreground). You can do this with bracketing. Or you can do it manually. I suggest manually! With LiveView on! Why? Because you can see the stop points yourself and control them. If your initial foreground meter was 1/20s, your next stop is 1/40s, then 1/80s, then 1/160s, then 1/320s, then 1/640s, etc. See the trend? A stop of shutter is doubled or halved depending on gaining or stopping light. I do it like this manually so that I have control over what I'm getting. I do several 1 stop exposures rather than 3 or 5 two-stop exposures via bracketing. And I do it with LiveView on so that I can see the overexposed and underexposed images and everything between. This way I know I have enough information between those two points to then blend a good HDR from.

5. You can do this from an app via your 6D wirelessly so that you never touch the camera! Look into it. The 6D was made for this kind of stuff, so useful.

Very best,

Auto HDR is pointless on a DSLR. It works great on a smartphone, however, that's another story.

To produce an image with a decent dynamic range requires more than what people give credit for. You kind of need to start with how you want the resulting image to look. For me it's about trying to keep as close to how your eye saw it as you can. That can mean deep shadows and blown out highlights. Most of the time with nailing the exposure and clever post processing it can be done in one shot.

Believe it or not, but this image is one exposure. I did try a HDR edit, however I picked out the middle exposure from the set and just worked on it. Turned out the way I saw it.

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I haven't tried the HDR on my 6D yet. I'll probably give it a whirl just to check it out, but I'd prefer to do it myself.

I just got my 6d a couple of days ago and was curious about in-camera hdr, have always done it manually. Then I read the final image is only stored as a jpg so I decided I won't ever try it with the 6d since I always shoot in raw.

Paulstw wrote in post #17024740
Auto HDR is pointless on a DSLR. It works great on a smartphone, however, that's another story.

To produce an image with a decent dynamic range requires more than what people give credit for. You kind of need to start with how you want the resulting image to look. For me it's about trying to keep as close to how your eye saw it as you can. That can mean deep shadows and blown out highlights. Most of the time with nailing the exposure and clever post processing it can be done in one shot.

Believe it or not, but this image is one exposure. I did try a HDR edit, however I picked out the middle exposure from the set and just worked on it. Turned out the way I saw it.

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

As the daylight ends by campsiephoto, on Flickr

I never let the camera do it for me. I whack it into manual on a tripod and compose my shot. I then fire up Live View and pull up with histogram. I pull my histogram as far up to the right as I can before clipping the whites. More often than not it's the sun that fools the meter. You'll get a real time view of the shot in LV anyway so you'll see how it looks. As long as there's no info lost in the shadows, you can pretty much do anything with it in post.

Definitely with the latest cameras. This wasn't possible really until the last 3 FF bodies came out (post 5D2). Up to that point, pulling any shadow -2 or more in the shadows left you with hideous banding and/or exaggerated noise that was nearly impossible to remove. I personally believe Canon has eeked out the best they can do with the current sensor design, and will need to redesign something in order to attack Sony's capabilities.

One other thing, I don't see that many pictures on your first post. With HDR, the camera brackets and goes into continous mode automatically. You have to keep the shutter pressed to let the camera take several exposures. By default, it's 3: an underexposure, "normal exposure", and an overexposure. If that first image is just the "normal" exposure, then the dynamic range isn't that great. I don't see any blown highlights, and the overall tone of the sky vs house isn't drastically different. Just be sure to meter for the normal exposure, then in HDR mode, you should also have an overexposure and underexposure shot. Also making sure you're shooting in RAW gives you the highest dynamic range as well.

Although I've only been shooting Canon and the 6D for about a month now, I'm finding that there is enough in a single exposure to produce the desired HDR look without the bracketed shots. Which is how it was with the D600. There's plenty of DR range with the 6D and it's a lot closer to the D600 then what many believe it is. At least with real world applications.